The Lord of Stariel

by A J Lancaster

  “Which I can’t,” Hetta said, unnecessarily. “That’s what Jack was getting at.” Oh, that was irritating to admit, that Jack’s accusation might have some logical basis. Anger stirred again; logic be dashed. Jack still should’ve known she wouldn’t have misused her powers so!

  “What?” Marius looked up from the passage he’d been re-reading.

  “Before he accused me of rigging the Choosing, he asked me if I knew about a flash flood in the upper reaches last night.” They both glanced involuntarily towards the view, where the Indigoes made dark shapes in the grey, overcast clouds.

  Marius frowned, grimness sharpening the angles of his face. “When you touched the Star Stone, did you feel anything?”

  Hetta shook her head. “There was just the blue glow and the lightshow that you saw. I was shocked, of course, but I don’t think I felt anything from the Stone itself.”

  Marius became, if possible, even grimmer, pursing his lips. “I think you should try touching the Stone again.”

  Hetta was taken aback. “All right. What are you thinking?”

  But he shook his head as they left the library. “I need more data.”

  They picked their way through the house, heading down the stairs to the understory. The understory consisted of the cellars, the ice room, the old dungeon that nowadays was used for storage, and the Vault. Hetta had the key to the Vault—it had been pressed upon her with some ritual words when she was still reeling in shock after the Choosing, and she opened the door and let them inside.

  In their forefathers’ day, the Vault would have been full of actual treasure. Nowadays, treasure was kept in banks, or at least it would’ve been if they had any. Instead, the Vault was used for items that were too valuable or too fragile to be left on open display. The small, uncluttered room held a strong smell of dust, making Hetta’s nose itch. The box that contained the Stone when it wasn’t being used sat neatly in one corner, entirely unprepossessing.

  Hetta opened it. The object that had changed her life stared up at her. The Star Stone seemed less magical down here, less lustrous. Hetta hovered her fingers above its surface. What if, despite everything, she somehow hadn’t really been chosen and touching the Stone now would seal her fate? No—she was being foolish. Stariel had chosen her, whether she liked it or not. No point being missish about it. She pressed her hands against the cool blue surface.

  Nothing whatsoever happened.

  She looked towards Marius and knew without asking that this wasn’t what he’d been hoping for.

  “I take it that wasn’t the desired effect. What’s supposed to happen?”

  “Apparently the Stone should glow in response to your touch.” He wrestled with some inner turmoil for a few seconds, then held out his hands for the Stone. Hetta handed it to him. Tension stretched between them, but nothing continued to happen as it touched his skin. Marius almost dropped it in relief but managed to catch himself in time. He let out a long breath, bringing the Star Stone up to eye-level, turning it this way and that. It glimmered dully, nothing like the hypnotising patterns it had had under the full moon.

  He frowned. “This isn’t star indigo.”

  “What?” Hetta said, although she’d understood his words perfectly.

  “This isn’t star indigo,” Marius repeated. “Although it’s a very good facsimile of it. Enough, with moonlight and illusion added in, to fool anyone. This isn’t the Star Stone.”

  “Which means,” Hetta said for them both, “that I’m not the Lord of Stariel.”

  20

  The Plot Thickens

  Her words set two equally frantic but entirely separate trains of thought running, like shockwaves travelling in opposite directions from a single epicentre. One train of thought focussed on what this meant for the estate. This fake meant that there was currently no Lord of Stariel. Which meant they would need to hold the Choosing again. Except they needed the real Star Stone for that, and Hetta had no idea where it was. Someone had replaced it with a fake one. Someone had wanted Hetta to become lord. Who? Why? And what had they done with the real Stone?

  The other train of thought was much more personal. If she wasn’t the Lord of Stariel, then there was no reason for her to stay. She was relieved. Wasn’t she? Of course she was. It was only that there was unfinished business here now, and it would be difficult to suddenly disengage from it. Could she really leave the estate without even trying to figure out who had done this and why? But she could, couldn’t she? She could walk away right now and return to Meridon on the sleeper train tonight. But would Bradfield want her back after she’d so abruptly left him in the lurch?

  Marius seemed to be on a thought track of his own, for he said in a soft, stunned voice: “This means it wasn’t my fault you were chosen.”

  These words were bewildering enough to derail Hetta. “What?”

  Marius went pale, as if he hadn’t realised he’d spoken aloud. “I didn’t touch it,” he blurted.

  Hetta stared at him. “What?” she repeated. She needed to stop uttering that monosyllable, but she felt unusually thick-witted.

  Muted, everyday sounds travelled down from the house above, jarring signs that elsewhere, life was continuing as if the world hadn’t been set on its end.

  Marius swallowed. “At the Choosing. I didn’t touch the Stone.” He looked down at the false Stone in his hands. “I didn’t want to be chosen. I thought Jack would be the next lord. I never meant to inflict it on you. But this means I didn’t—that what I did didn’t matter. It wasn’t the real Stone.” There was both guilt and relief in his tone, but his shoulders drew up around his ears, a hedgehog retreating into its prickles; he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Hetta felt there were entirely too many revelations happening in this tiny room. She closed her eyes briefly and then said evenly: “I can’t deal with that now, Marius. Setting it aside, the main question here is what we do now we know I’m not lord.”

  They both looked down at the fake Stone, and Marius voiced one of her own thoughts. “Where is the real Star Stone, then?”

  “With whoever did this, I imagine.”

  Marius’s frown deepened. Evidently he hadn’t gotten quite as far along that train of thought as her yet. “But why would anyone want to set you up as the Lord of Stariel?”

  “Why indeed?” Hetta mused. “Is the Star Stone essential to the Choosing?”

  “Yes,” he said, then added, “but it’s not irreplaceable. There have been times in our histories when it has been lost or damaged and a new one had to be crafted.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Hetta said briskly. She smiled at Marius, mainly in relief. “Otherwise whoever has it would have us quite at their mercy.”

  Marius didn’t smile back. “Yes, but it’s not a simple process. I was reading a bit about it before, and for one thing, you need a decent piece of star indigo. And for another, you need some fairly exotic ingredients. I think we should try and recover the old one first. And Hetta,” he added with some force, “I don’t think we should tell anyone there’s something wrong until we do.”

  Hetta glanced up at him in surprise. “I was resigned to taking up the lord’s mantle when I thought it my duty, but I don’t see how I can do so now, when I know myself to be an imposter. Besides, Jack already knows something is amiss.”

  “Tell Jack, then, if you must,” Marius allowed. “But think, Hetta. If whoever did this finds out we’ve discovered the deception, they’ll likely destroy the Star Stone, and we’ll never find out what this was about.”

  “But we could openly make a new Stone,” Hetta pointed out. “It will look far worse if we wait and then tell everyone that we need to re-do the Choosing Ceremony after I’ve been lording around here for ages.”

  Marius looked down at the Stone in his hand. “A few more days then. It’s already going to be awkward. Surely it won’t matter much either way, a few days?”

  “In my experience, lying is never as simple as you think it is going to be.
” But he was right, and she could already see the train to Meridon disappearing into the distance, leaving her on the platform once again. Someone had taken the real Star Stone; that didn’t suggest anything good about their motives. Could she really leave Stariel, leave a potential enemy to the estate behind, without making the least attempt to resolve the mystery? And there were those other balls she’d already set in motion as the new lord; she’d need time to tidy them up. “But you’re right. I’d like to know who did this too, and what they meant by it. But if we have no leads by the end of the week, we’ll have to tell everyone the truth. And I’m not keeping this from Jack if he accuses me again.” It wasn’t only that she couldn’t bear the thought of him thinking she’d done this deliberately; mainly she had a fair knowledge of her own temper when provoked.

  “It couldn’t be his doing, anyway,” Marius said. He added thoughtfully, “And it might actually be someone who had it in for him who did it in the first place.”

  She followed his chain of logic easily enough. The idea that Jack would deliberately appoint someone else as Lord of Stariel could clearly be discarded. That someone might have wanted to ensure Jack didn’t inherit might be a plausible motive—but who held such a grudge against Jack?

  “Why me?” Hetta wondered aloud. If someone wanted to punish Jack, there was Marius ahead of her, who wouldn’t have been so unexpected a choice.

  Marius paled again. “Maybe it was my fault after all. Maybe the illusion was meant to activate after a certain number of people touched it. And I didn’t touch it.”

  The illusion. It galled Hetta to realise that Aunt Sybil and Jack were right; illusory magic had been used at the Choosing Ceremony.

  “Perhaps,” Hetta said slowly. “Or it could have been attuned to me personally. But setting a trigger for an illusion is difficult magic. It’s much easier to cast in person.” She picked up the stone to examine it more thoroughly, but the residue of whatever magic had been cast upon it had long since faded. Illusion required a lot of power to sustain for any length of time, and this spell had only had to perform just long enough to convince the crowd at the Standing Stones.

  Marius was shaking his head. “I’m so sorry, Hetta. I never…” He bit his words back, guilt etched in the tightness of his lips. That deeper sorrow that had haunted him lately flickered in his eyes.

  Hetta felt briefly impatient with him, tempered with sympathy for whatever wound he was still hiding from her. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Marius, if you have a breakdown about your role in this when clearly I am the one most seriously affected by it, I will be forced to lose my temper with you. You ought to be comforting me.” She made her words light, but they seemed to help him.

  He straightened a little, giving a weak smile. “Yes. Yes. I’m sorry. How terribly inconsiderate to make this all about me. How are you feeling, Hetta?”

  “Angry.” She stared down at the fake Stone. “That someone is pulling strings and making us all dance for them.” She put the Stone back in its box, carefully closing the lid. “I need to think about how this might have been accomplished.” And she needed to process what it meant for her, personally, that she wasn’t the Lord of Stariel. She felt very much like a ball thrown up in the air, in that weightless moment before the pull of the earth began to drag it down. That it would come down was known and inevitable, but it was hard to know what she was truly feeling until it did.

  They parted after discussing who they should question first and how it might be done without raising suspicion. She went to her father’s study. It gave her a strange pang to think this would be someone else’s study—probably Jack’s—in not so very long.

  But she wasn’t alone. Wyn waited patiently by the window, sunlight glinting in his white-blond hair. He looked up calmly when Hetta entered and smiled.

  “Well,” he said. “I think it is time I explained myself.”

  21

  Miss Gwen

  Hetta pulled the door shut and said in a dangerous tone, “Oh you do, do you?”

  “I’m afraid so.” He gave an apologetic shrug.

  It was too much. Hetta began to laugh, but she found that she couldn’t stop once she’d started. Laughter choked out of her like bits of glass, bright and painful, turning dangerously close to tears.

  “Hetta, Hetta, what’s wrong?” He closed the space between them and put his hands on her shoulders. She hiccoughed and made the mistake of looking up. His face was so close that she could pick out individual eyelashes, the same white-blond as his hair, dramatic against his darker skin tone. Like frosting, she thought inanely. He smelled faintly of cardamom, as if he’d come from baking spice-bread in the kitchens.

  She had a sudden urge to fold against him, but a treacherous thought swam up: Wyn could do magic. Magic had been used to fake the Choosing. She made herself take a step away from her friend. He didn’t resist the movement, but he did cant his head and give her a small, sad smile.

  “I’m not the Lord of Stariel,” Hetta said, even though she’d promised Marius less than five minutes ago that she wouldn’t reveal that to anyone except Jack. “The Star Stone is a fake.”

  Wyn’s expression grew grave. “I was afraid of something like that.”

  Hetta stared at him with disbelief. “Does everyone in this household have some deep, dark secret they’ve been keeping from me in order to reveal it at the most dramatic moment possible?”

  Wyn’s lips twitched. “Probably. But this secret is my own—it is not my place to tell others’.” He let out a long breath, running a hand through his hair. His gaze went to the window, to the view across the lake and beyond it the mountains. It seemed to steel something in him as he turned back, his russet eyes solemn. “I hardly know where to begin. I have been holding this one inside for so long, past the time when I ought to have shared it with you, my friend. I hope you will forgive me.”

  “This sounds like it’s going to be a long story,” Hetta said, alive with curiosity. “And in that case, I think I’m going to need a drink. Sit.” She went to retrieve the decanter of whisky and glasses from the bottom drawer of her father’s desk. She poured them both a generous measure, the amber liquid sloshing softly. Hetta pushed one across the desk and sat down behind it, deliberately putting the solid wood between them.

  Wyn’s long fingers moved restlessly on the surface of the desk, and he drew a circle around the top of the glass. “I suppose it begins with what I am.”

  Before he could say anything further, the door swung open. The delicate form of Miss Gwen appeared in the frame, saying:

  “I’m so sorry to invade, Lord Valstar, but I wanted to speak with you—” She caught sight of Wyn and abruptly broke off.

  If she’d actually changed form, the transformation couldn’t have been more dramatic. Miss Gwen’s eyes glowed a bright, poisonous blue, and unholy glee dawned in her expression. It wasn’t the face or expression of a young ingenue. It was the disbelieving smile of a shark discovering a bird has fallen into its watery domain.

  “Hallowyn Tempestren Spireborn,” she breathed. A little frisson of elektricity passed over Hetta’s neck, a magic she didn’t recognise. “Prince Hallowyn Tempestren, here, in mortal form.” Miss Gwen gave a short, triumphant laugh, glittering with malice.

  Wyn moved, so suddenly it didn’t seem quite real. He was somehow, impossibly, across the room and looming down at Miss Gwen between one heartbeat and the next. “Gwendelfear of Dusken Roses, by your name, I command thee. Sleep.” His voice was deeper than normal, and again, a strange power moved in the air. The room thrummed with the heavy pressure of an oncoming storm, and Miss Gwen collapsed. Wyn caught her, lowering her motionless body to the floor.

  Hetta stood in frozen horror as Wyn left Miss Gwen and went to the open door, closing it after a quick glance in each direction. He blew out a sharp, controlled breath and turned to face her. The wildness that sometimes lurked beneath his surface was in ascendance, the dark planes of his face unnaturally sharp, his hair faintly l
uminescent, more silver than blond. His eyes burned, and she thought not of comparisons to the colour of horse-chestnuts, but of blood spilled across ancient wood.

  He was terrifyingly beautiful and utterly alien.

  Fear bloomed, just as alien, because this was Wyn, her oldest friend, but it didn’t stop her reaching for her magic. It wasn’t illusion she called for, the magic of fine control and steady imagery, but emotional, volatile pyromancy—a magic with no place in modern life. Fire simmered up beneath her skin, the warmth reassuring.

  He met her eyes with steady resignation, waiting. Waiting for…what? For me to pass judgement, she realised in a rush, and the fear snuffed out. She’d seen that expression before, on the night he’d come to them, half-dead and frightened out of his mind by a past he wouldn’t speak of. He looked now as he did then, filled with desperate, aching loneliness, both pleading for help and wholly resigned to receiving none.

  Hetta let her magic subside, unsure what exactly she’d planned to do with it anyway. “Tell me what’s going on. What have you done to Miss Gwen?”

  Wyn breathed in unsteadily, a little more humanity seeping into his appearance. He looked down at Miss Gwen’s still form. “Her name is Gwendelfear, and I have forced her to sleep. It will not last. I do not know what to do with her now.” He said the last almost wonderingly, and she recognised the mirror of her own blank shock earlier. “I do not know what to do.” Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who’d had the world change course on her without warning. It didn’t give her much satisfaction.